Klausner Technologies seeks to milk money out of Apple, and in a seperate suit out of Comcast, Cablevision Systems, and eBay's Skype

What is lauded by many users as one of the iPhone's hottest features has just landed the electronics giant in some hot legal waters.

TIME magazine's invention of the year, just landed one of the bigger patent infringement suits of the year. Klausner Technologies has filed suit against Apple claiming the giant infringed on its patent for visual voicemail, and is seeking $360M in compensation and damages.

Klausner holds U.S. patents 5,572,576 and 5,283,818. The patents basically describe a system that allows for visual retrieval and sorting of voicemail via a display. The patents certainly sound like they would cover any visual voicemail setup, which likely is making Apple pretty nervous.

The plaintiff cites Apple's states that visual voicemail is "one of the greatest advances in the history of mankind ... without question" and yet is shorting the inventor on royalties.

Various other companies have already paid Klausner Technologies to license these patents, including Time Warner's AOL, which features the technology in its AOL Voicemail service. Vonage also pays to use the technology in its Voicemail Plus service.

Apple and AT&T refused to make immediate comments on the lawsuit.

The suit was filed by California law firm of Dovel & Luner in a
federal court in the Eastern District of Texas. Klausner also attacked Comcast's Digital Voice Voicemail, Cablevision Systems' Optimum Voicemail, and Ebay's Skype, filing a separate lawsuit in the same court, on the same day. The second suit cites infringement on the same patents and seeks from the group of infringers a barely lighter $300M.

Klausner Technologies is an avid patent seeker, and was founded by Judah Klausner who invented and patented the PDA and electronic organizer. Judah owns the legendary U.S. patent 4,117,542 which covers these devices. He licensed his PDA patent under an OEM license to Apple so that Apple could develop its Newton PDA, which became the archetype for many PDAs to come. Klausner's new company has oft been compared to licenser NTP for its aggressive patent mongering -- though in Klausner's defense, he has singularly come up with a large portion of the ideas.

Well keep in mind that things were quite different when that patent went through. Due to all of the variations of mobile devices these days it does somewhat absurd but at the time of issuance the scope probably didn't seem as wide.

Aside from that, I had a good laugh at the tone of the article as much like many other DT articles regarding Apple it tends to insinuate that Apple is scared/nervous/beaten; facing opposition and attack everywhere it turns. The latter may be true to some extent, but I find it ludicrous to believe that given Apple's previous interactions with Klausner and knowledge of other visual voicemail systems that they were not aware of the possibility of litigation. Most likely they were at least aware of potential litigation and decided that it was worth the risk.

Apple may be facing many lawsuits, but excluding this one in particular most of them are further examples of the dumb 'I can sue anyone for anything!' mentality that we have in America. In this case I wish Klausner luck, I respect the spirit of the inventor and entrepreneur (although I'm not a big fan of patent mongering) and I'm not a giant fan of Apple regardless.

quote: The latter may be true to some extent, but I find it ludicrous to believe that given Apple's previous interactions with Klausner and knowledge of other visual voicemail systems that they were not aware of the possibility of litigation. Most likely they were at least aware of potential litigation and decided that it was worth the risk.

It's probably a given that Apple was "requested" to sign up for royalties long prior to the lawsuit being filed. So they had to have seen this coming.